1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cellular phone handset, and more particularly, to a cellular phone handset which can display a variety of special characters.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Many cellular phone handsets such as a GSM (Global System of Mobile communications) wireless handset can function as a phone book. A handset which serves this function usually stores a few thousand frequently used Chinese characters in its memory. However, most of the characters stored in the memory may rarely or never be used, thus they waste a lot of memory space. On the other hand, if a user needs to use a Chinese character which is not pre-stored in the memory, the cellular phone handset won't be able to display the character correctly. Besides, if the user needs to use other kinds of graphic characters such as Japanese, Korean or simplified Chinese, other fonts of characters or special symbols and graphics, the handset cannot store all these characters and symbols into its limited memory. Even if the handset has stored a lot of character data in its memory, it still cannot meet all users' different needs. Therefore, using the memory more efficiently becomes an important issue.
A good cellular phone handset has to be compact, thus it is sometimes connected to a computer for editing its phone book. The computer uses its I/O device to provide a better data editing interface for the handset. After the phone book data has been edited, the computer will transmit the generated character codes through its I/O port to the handset. The handset then retrieves character fonts from its memory according to the received character codes, and displays the characters on a displaying device such as an LCD. If some special characters, fonts or symbols are not pre-stored in the memory of the handset, the handset cannot correctly display the special characters, fonts or symbols.